Apple has announced that the Navigo transit card can be added to the Wallet app starting today, allowing iPhone and Apple Watch users to simply tap their devices to pay for rides on the metro, trains, buses, and more in the Paris, France area.
With the Navigo card in the Wallet app, a rider no longer needs to visit a ticket vending machine, or reload the card at retailers. Instead, passes can be purchased directly in the Wallet app on the iPhone, or in the Île-de-France Mobilités app.
Apple also announced that real-time transit information for the Paris area will be available in Apple Maps starting this week. This feature will allow riders to view detailed schedules, live departure and arrival times, delays, outages, and any connections required to complete a trip across multiple transit systems.
In related news, it was recently announced that the PRESTO transit card in the Toronto, Canada area will soon support the Wallet app too.
In both cities, the transit cards will support Express Mode, meaning that riders can simply hold their iPhone or Apple Watch near a payment reader to pay for their ride, without needing to unlock or wake the device. Express Mode continues to work for up to five hours after an iPhone has run out of battery power.
Thanks, Apollo Zhao!
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Just go into Wallet and hit the + button, then Travel Card, scroll down to France.
It’ll then give you the ticket options. A new virtual card is generated by the Wallet app after payment.
Screenshots are attached.
A few things to note.
1. The card is automatically added to Wallet after payment
2. If the card adding fails, it’ll be available to add later. You won’t lose your card.
3. You can have both the Travel Card AND a debit/credit card active in Express Transit. It’ll use whichever one is valid in the transit system you are using.
4. You can be notified when you are running low on tickets
5. There’s a tab for transactions.
I'd expect that if you got a new iPhone, you might not (or maybe you might) be able to transfer the card. You'd just get a new virtual card. Not sure what would happen to your 10 ticket carnet if you had bought one of them and had to replace your iPhone if the virtual card can't be transferred over.
There's a €2 deposit on the physical card I own which I don't think one can get refunded if I decide to move over to the virtual/wallet version, so I'll just stick with using the card for now.
This is quite different to other cards, such as Octopus (Hong Kong) and Pasmo (Japan) which scanned the cards and took the remaining credit from the physical cards to the new virtual ones.
Excellent.